HPC in the NY Times

I knew that Ashlee’s move to the NY Times would be a good thing for us. Exhibit B, this article in yesterday’s Times, about the growing uses of HPC that go along with the falling prices.

Supercomputers, which are up to a million times faster than the typical desktop PC, are still staples in the data warehouses of national laboratories and universities in the United States, Japan and Western Europe. But over the last few years, the falling cost of supercomputer systems has allowed a broader range of corporations and institutions, including many in China and India, to buy them for everything from processing movie graphics to searching for oil.

Quotes from industry luminaries, including a delightfully cranky take on the industry from Mark Seager

“They are not buying these machines because they like to burn electricity and heat the air,” said Mark Seager, head of advanced computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “It’s for the simulation capabilities, which will be an important economic driver not just for the U.S., but for anyone else with two neurons to rub together.”

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